TODD SEAVEY
author of Libertarianism for Beginners and writer of/speaker about many other things

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

14 Time-Related Items to Start ’14 (including Jeffrey Tucker)

I’ve resolved to do less blogging, Facing, and tweeting this
year (aside from plugging new projects) but should wrap up this phase of
blogging history and transition into the next with a climactic “Month of Time Travel,” that is, items
that blend past and future in revealing ways -- like steampunk but less
annoying.Here are 14 short items of
that sort to launch ’14.

(It’s a good time to think about time travel, what with this odd research having just been
published about combing the Net for evidence of time travelers.The researchers found nothing, so to enjoy
time travel you’ll have to look to fiction, like this altered finale of Star Trek: Voyager someone went to the
trouble of editing that excludes the romance between Chakotay and Seven.Regardless, it holds up well -- really,
rewatch the final ten minutes if you haven’t seen it in a decade.)

1. Some will recall this blog started around late 2006, just
after GOP lost Congress for turning the Arab world into the sort of unstable
region where, hell, Fallujah
might well end up controlled by al Qaeda eight years later for all we knew --
but it was still prior to the Financial Crisis, which is when my thinking
really began to (subtly) change and I increasingly found myself sympathizing with
radicals instead of the quit-your-complaining bourgeoisie.

To really understand my personal evolution in the preceding years, though, the thing to do
may be to read the
“Retro-Journal” entries I started writing about a year after the blog
launched, explaining everything that had
happened since high schoolup to that
point.

4. It’s enough to
make even a right-leaning mind greatly sympathize with, say, wacko liberal Bill Maherranting
about LSD back in 2011 (h/t Rob Szarka).Maybe now’s a good time to admit I’m newly fascinated by the recurring
hallucinations of shiny “machine elves” many DMT users have reported -- not
that I’m saying they exist beyond our sometimes surprisingy-similar minds.Nor does the ghostly orb one of my relatives
saw on the night another relative died.Probably.

5. For a more
consistent, across-the-board celebration of freedom than Maher’s LSD rant,
though, check out Jeffrey Tucker’s libertarian essay collection Bourbon for Breakfast (thanks
to Ooana Trien for the loan).

Tucker’s arguably something of a “paleo,” with his
appreciation of the civilization that preceded our statist wrong turn, but he
is a reminder that it’s best to ditch any association that term might once have
had with Buchananites and to move forward in an unapologetically
anarchist-libertarian fashion.The Mises
Institute veteran and founder of Liberty.me is
notoriously one of the happiest-seeming
lovers of liberty you’ll encounter.Instead
of just grousing about the government, he celebrates all the little everyday
victories we can achieve over unfreedom.

Unless you have a heart of stone, you will smile your way
through essays about things like how to undo the government-mandated low-flow
restriction on your showerhead (something just foisted on me a few weeks ago
after over a decade of being a tenant who had barely ever had any maintenance
done on his bathroom, aside from that time part of the ceiling fell in, and
thus not drawn the attention of flow-altering supers).Without urging readers to break the law
(which would itself be illegal), Tucker expresses glee not only at the ease
with which you can take a screwdriver to that thing but also the ease with
which one company, for a time, got around the regulation on
gallons-per-showerhead by simply selling multiple-showerhead attachments.

Tucker also shares my dislike of shaving cream, having
discovered years ago, as I recently have, that you can just as easily shave
without it and thereby simplify your life (this may put us both at odds with author
Alexander Rose, who convinced me buying expensive fancy shaving
accouterments and such was the way to go).

He likewise tackles the potentially divisive issue of
intellectual property not with frowny-faced arguments but with cheers for the
ease with which old, otherwise easily-forgotten authors can be kept alive if
the copyright lawyers can be kept at bay.He jokes about the sad but logical outcomes of IP such as professors who
forbid students to use the ideas they learn in class (on pain of lawsuit),
which would seem to defeat the point of learning.There has to be a better way.

He offers frequent proof that optimism about markets and
pessimism about government tends to make one prescient, as in 2006 when he
wrote (criticizing the whole idea of government “cyber-security”): “If
experience is our guide, the government in a position of authority is more
likely to be creating viruses and spyware than stopping them.As for the impact of the law, I vaguely seem
to recall some legislation passed a few years ago that made spam illegal.”

He can draw similarly useful lessons from experiences

in
traffic court, watching poor people lose licenses they need to survive
economically while he gets repeatedly shafted by a poorly-placed stop sign in
his neighborhood (one that simply disappeared one day, to no one’s detriment,
after years of making his morning commute more legally perilous).Instead of worrying over the supposedly tough
questions put to libertarians, such as “Who will build the roads?” Tucker
laughs at the absurdities caused by the governmental alternative -- and
concludes, “Ultimately, the state is in control or we are.There is nothing in between.”

Tragically, though, what’s in between in reality is often
corporate/government cronyism that makes a mockery of both free-market and
left-wing ideals.He notes the windfall
likely reaped by certain drug companies (but not others) when that big crackdown
on the purchase of meth-ingredient substances occurred a few years ago (he too
discovered it’s now a bureaucratic hassle to buy more than two boxes of cold
medication at the drug store no matter how drippy your nose).

When problems of statism seem intractable, though, he has
ample other interests to cover, including detailed instructions on how to look
as dapper as he (again, notoriously) always does.I admit I am not following these dressing
instructions, nor any others, really.Snappy outfits are not enough to make him like Mad Men, though, since he rightly sees that the show is intended to
reveal how barbarous the world was before the regulations of recent decades
were imposed.

(By contrast, I would say that Mad Men is yet another glorious example, like Jurassic Park or The Matrix,
of how viewers manage to extract libertarian messages from what were intended
to be non-libertarian works of art: That show may singlehandedly have changed
our popular culture from one in which Boomers and Gen Xers envied the freedoms
created by the hippies into one in which Millennials envy the freedoms that preceded the hippies.You couldn’t ask for a better
paleolibertarian victory than that.At
the very least, the show should probably appeal to Tucker’s Chestertonian
contrarian streak, given essays like the ones in which he urges people to show
their sophistication by drinking a lot while they’re young and still can.)

You should by now be ordering Bourbon
for Breakfast (or just reading it online), but if you’re not convinced,
rest assured Tucker also has appreciative thoughts on Dr. Jekyll-as-liberal,
Garet Garrett as an all too rare novelist who dramatizes commerce instead of
violence, the anarchism of Mark Twain, the subtlety of film noir, and even the
unabashedly Old Left absurdity of Spider-Man’s pessimistic world.Check it out.

6. I suppose anytime one praises a paleo or Mises Institute figure these days, one is supposed to add
caveats about various heretical things those folks have said or done, but
frankly if we start criticizing related
phenomena ranging from “neo-reaction,” mid-century literary drunks, and
arguably-unlibertarian views on border enforcement to the odd culture battles
created when someone like Angela Keaton champions gays -- or for that matter
Rand Paul decides to become the GOP’s racial outreach director in Detroit --
we’ll be here all day, and I’ll be exhausted.

So let’s just say you don’t have to agree with people about
everything to learn a great deal from them and leave it at that.Look how much time that tolerant notion saves.

7. Speaking of Rand Paul: Jeffrey Tucker has politely
refrained from guessing how Rothbard would’ve felt about Paul running for president in 2016
(even while taking some heat from libertarians so radical they see Paul as a
statist), but I’m willing to say Rothbard’d likely be ecstatic about a Rand Paul presidential
run, given that Rothbard was willing to urge tactical votes even for the likes
of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot (with attendant praise of them) if he thought
that in context it would act to stave off greater statist threats.(And if you think I’m now endorsing Pat
Buchanan, please reread items 2-4.)

8. I’m not sure if Gen X nostalgia counts as retrograde yet
or is still semi-hip, but regardless I’m pleased the Kennedy-led show The Independents makes frequent use of Gen
X-pleasing rock for its bumpers.

10. Another Gen X alternative rock (and MTV) note: I think
we should pity the late Benjamin Orr,
who sang half the Cars’ cool
early songs and was quite the hunk (as I totally failed to notice until
recently as a lad but would imagine the ladies would agree) yet somehow failed
to become the sole visual icon of the band as it entered the video era, ceding
that role to the physically-impossible-looking geek Ric Ocasek (and I say that
with love).

11. Elsewhere in New
England, Grandma turns 100,
and at my father’s urging this weekend she described (in Tuckeresque fashion) some
practical differences in her home back in 1914 or so: a wooden icebox, a hand
washboard only for cleaning clothes, and, perhaps more amazingly to you moderns,
no electric lights -- just kerosene
lamps.Be grateful.She is.

My anarcho-capitalist friend Jesse Forgione might add that
you can at the same time be appreciative of old-fashioned but high-quality
items like the ninety year-old Edison bulb still running in the house of one of
his relatives.That’s something my
mother would like to have instead of government-mandated screw-shaped bulbs she
hates or the “free” normal-looking ones the city of Norwich handed out to
homeowners like her -- only to have them burn out within about a day.Government is an impediment to civilization, albeit
an inept one -- if you defend it, you are a monster, not a vehicle of
compassion.

12. In still more house-oriented New England news, you might
be able to deduce from local listings and/or PBS.org when my friend Dave
Whitney will appear on This Old House, since the “Arlington
Italianate” house they’re covering for a few episodes is a project he worked on
(though he doesn’t appear in the first episode of that arc, which just aired in
the past few days in some markets).